Should the Royal Mail only do three deliveries a week?

The Royal Mail has announced a drastic drop in profits, because basically, everyone is sending fewer letters, and thanks to increased competition in the parcel game, the Royal Mail is seeing less go through their hands too.

So what happens next?

Well, an economist who appeared on BBC Radio's 'Wake Up to Money' has had an idea - that the Royal Mail can't deliver our mail 6-days-a-week any more, and their business be relevant.

With that, Ian Senior thinks that deliveries should be dropped to three per week.

He said: "The business is still viable, particularly on the parcels side."

"You have to realise that value of delivering a parcel is going up, the value of delivering a letter is going down. The great majority of letter mail is not time sensitive anymore."

The Royal Mail, of course, aren't having that. A spokesperson for the postal firm said: "We do not agree with anyone who says that the Universal Service specification should be cut to three days a week."

"The six-day-a-week service is a key part of the Postal Services Act and we are proud to deliver it."

Just how big was the profit drop? Well, in 2015, the Royal Mail made £400 million, but at the end of March, that was down to £267 million.

That seems like a lot of money, but profits would have been considerably lower if the Royal Mail hadn't sold their Paddington depot.

Royal Mail added: "The UK letters market has been subject to a structural shift away from paper-based communication to electronic communication for a number of years now."

"Given this structural decline we are focused on promoting the value of mail through campaigns such as keep me posted and optimising mail handling within our operations to accommodate a changing letters mix and increase efficiency."

4 comments

Al27

Sending a parcel with them is a massive PITA. Even when you've paid online and printed the label you have to stand in a post office queue, making the whole online thing moot. And they have a nosey about what's in your parcel and try to flog you insurance for it. You can stick a pre-paid letter in a post box, but with parcels it's easier to use someone like MyHermes where they come to you. Yes Parcelforce will do that, but they cost more than their rivals.

Why the hell don't they just have a big parcel deposit box where you can ditch and run in every branch?

Sending parcels using 2nd class used to be viable. Now, it just costs too much and everyone uses Hermes. Then, they also decided to charge per size rather than weight alone and that has put off a lot of people sending mail with Royal Mail.